Virtual private networks distributed across multiple cloud-computing facilities

ABSTRACT

The current document discloses methods and systems for extending an internal network within a first cloud-computing facility to a second cloud-computing facility and using the extended internal network as a basis for creating virtual private clouds distributed across multiple cloud-computing facilities. In one implementation, a pool of IP addresses is allocated and distributed to end appliances of the first and second cloud-computing facilities. In this implementation, the internal network is extended via a secure tunnel between end appliances in the first and second cloud-computing facilities and the end appliances of the extended internal network are configured to route messages transmitted by a first member of the virtual private cloud executing on a first cloud-computing facility to a second member of the virtual private cloud executing on a second cloud-computing facility through the secure tunnel.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 13/966,094, filed Aug. 13, 2013.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present patent application is directed to virtual-machine-based computing and cloud computing and, in particular, to methods and systems for creating virtual private networks distributed across multiple cloud-computing facilities.

BACKGROUND

The development and evolution of modern computing has, in many ways, been facilitated by the power of logical abstraction. Early computers were manually programmed by slow and tedious input of machine instructions into the computers' memories. Over time, assembly-language programs and assemblers were developed in order to provide a level of abstraction, namely assembly-language programs, above the machine-instruction hardware-interface level, to allow programmers to more rapidly and accurately develop programs. Assembly-language-based operations are more easily encoded by human programmers than machine-instruction-based operations, and assemblers provided additional features, including assembly directives, routine calls, and a logical framework for program development. The development of operating systems provided yet another type of abstraction that provided programmers with logical, easy-to-understand system-call interfaces to computer-hardware functionality. As operating systems developed, additional internal levels of abstraction were created within operating systems, including virtual memory, implemented by operating-system paging of memory pages between electronic memory and mass-storage devices, which provided easy-to-use, linear memory-address spaces much larger than could be provided by the hardware memory of computer systems. Additional levels of abstractions were created in the programming-language domain, with compilers developed for a wide variety of compiled languages that greatly advanced the ease of programming and the number and capabilities of programming tools with respect those provided by assemblers and assembly languages. Higher-level scripting languages and special-purpose interpreted languages provided even higher levels of abstraction and greater ease of application development in particular areas. Similarly, block-based and sector-based interfaces to mass-storage devices have been abstracted through many levels of abstraction to modern database management systems, which provide for high-available and fault-tolerant storage of structured data that can be analyzed, interpreted, and manipulated through powerful high-level query languages.

In many ways, a modern computer system can be thought of as many different levels of abstractions along many different, often interdependent, dimensions. More recently, powerful new levels of abstraction have been developed with respect to virtual machines, which provide virtual execution environments for application programs and operating systems. Virtual-machine technology essentially abstracts the hardware resources and interfaces of a computer system on behalf of one or multiple virtual machines, each comprising one or more application programs and an operating system. Even more recently, the emergence of cloud computing services can provide abstract interfaces to enormous collections of geographically dispersed data centers, allowing computational service providers to develop and deploy complex Internet-based services that execute on tens or hundreds of physical servers through abstract cloud-computing interfaces.

Within virtual servers as well as physical servers, virtual machines and virtual applications can be moved among multiple virtual or physical processors in order to facilitate load balancing and to collocate compatible virtual machines and virtual applications with respect to virtual and physical processors. Similarly, virtual machines and virtual applications can be moved among the virtual servers within a virtual data center as well as among physical servers within the underlying physical hardware within which virtual data centers are constructed. Migration of virtual machines and virtual applications within virtual data centers can also be used for load balancing, fault tolerance and high availability, and for many other purposes. Designers, developers, vendors, and users of virtualization technology continue to seek new facilities within emerging layers of virtualization for facilitating distributed execution across multiple cloud-computing facilities.

SUMMARY

The current document discloses methods and systems for creating virtual private networks across multiple cloud-computing facilities. A virtual cloud-connector server and virtual cloud-connector nodes, part of a distributed hybrid cloud infrastructure, are used to setup, configure, and manage virtual private networks across a distributed cloud infrastructure managed by the virtual cloud-connector server and virtual cloud-connector nodes. Virtual private networks established through the virtual cloud-connector server and virtual cloud-connector nodes allow corporate resources in a public cloud to access protected resources in a corporate data center and corporate resources in a corporate data center to access protected corporate resources in a public cloud. The virtual private networks carry messages and datagrams over a secure tunnel.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 provides a general architectural diagram for various types of computers.

FIG. 2 illustrates an Internet-connected distributed computer system.

FIG. 3 illustrates cloud computing.

FIG. 4 illustrates generalized hardware and software components of a general-purpose computer system, such as a general-purpose computer system having an architecture similar to that shown in FIG. 1.

FIG. 5 illustrates one type of virtual machine and virtual-machine execution environment.

FIG. 6 illustrates an OVF package.

FIG. 7 illustrates virtual data centers provided as an abstraction of underlying physical-data-center hardware components.

FIG. 8 illustrates virtual-machine components of a virtual-data-center management server and physical servers of a physical data center above which a virtual-data-center interface is provided by the virtual-data-center management server.

FIG. 9 illustrates a cloud-director level of abstraction.

FIG. 10 illustrates virtual-cloud-connector nodes (“VCC nodes”) and a VCC server, components of a distributed system that provides multi-cloud aggregation and that includes a cloud-connector server and cloud-connector nodes that cooperate to provide services that are distributed across multiple clouds.

FIG. 11 illustrates the VCC server and VCC nodes in a slightly different fashion than the VCC server and VCC nodes are illustrated in FIG. 10.

FIG. 12 illustrates one implementation of a VCC node.

FIG. 13 illustrates electronic communications between a client and server computer.

FIG. 14 illustrates another model for network communications used to interconnect consumers of services with service-providing applications running within server computers.

FIG. 15 illustrates a virtual application.

FIG. 16 illustrates virtualization of networking facilities within a physical data center.

FIG. 17 shows an organization virtual data center in a first cloud-computing facility and an organization virtual data center in a second cloud-computing facility that is used as an example multi-cloud environment in which a VPN is created.

FIGS. 18A-F illustrate an IPsec tunnel.

FIGS. 19A-H illustrate a hypothetical VCC-server administration interface displayed to a system administrator through a console PC or workstation.

FIGS. 20A-B illustrate VCC-server and VCC-node roles in establishment of inter-cloud VPNs.

FIGS. 21A-B illustrate the incorporation of inter-cloud VPN creation into the VCC server management interface.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

As discussed above, modern computing can be considered to be a collection of many different levels of abstraction above the physical computing-hardware level that includes physical computer systems, data-storage systems and devices, and communications networks. The present application is related to a multi-cloud-aggregation level of abstraction that provides homogenous-cloud and heterogeneous-cloud distributed management services, each cloud generally an abstraction of a large number of virtual resource pools comprising processing, storage, and network resources, each of which, in turn, can be considered to be a collection of abstractions above underlying physical hardware devices. The current document is directed to providing a straightforward and efficient method for the migration of virtual machines and virtual applications among virtual data centers within different cloud-computing facilities at the cloud-computing and virtual-data-center levels of abstraction.

Computer Architecture, Virtualization, Electronic Communications, and Virtual Networks

The term “abstraction” is not, in any way, intended to mean or suggest an abstract idea or concept. Computational abstractions are tangible, physical interfaces that are implemented, ultimately, using physical computer hardware, data-storage devices, and communications systems. Instead, the term “abstraction” refers, in the current discussion, to a logical level of functionality encapsulated within one or more concrete, tangible, physically-implemented computer systems with defined interfaces through which electronically-encoded data is exchanged, process execution launched, and electronic services are provided. Interfaces may include graphical and textual data displayed on physical display devices as well as computer programs and routines that control physical computer processors to carry out various tasks and operations and that are invoked through electronically implemented application programming interfaces (“APIs”) and other electronically implemented interfaces. There is a tendency among those unfamiliar with modern technology and science to misinterpret the terms “abstract” and “abstraction,” when used to describe certain aspects of modern computing. For example, one frequently encounters assertions that, because a computational system is described in terms of abstractions, functional layers, and interfaces, the computational system is somehow different from a physical machine or device. Such allegations are unfounded. One only needs to disconnect a computer system or group of computer systems from their respective power supplies to appreciate the physical, machine nature of complex computer technologies. One also frequently encounters statements that characterize a computational technology as being “only software,” and thus not a machine or device. Software is essentially a sequence of encoded symbols, such as a printout of a computer program or digitally encoded computer instructions sequentially stored in a file on an optical disk or within an electromechanical mass-storage device. Software alone can do nothing. It is only when encoded computer instructions are loaded into an electronic memory within a computer system and executed on a physical processor that so-called “software implemented” functionality is provided. The digitally encoded computer instructions are an essential control component of processor-controlled machines and devices, no less essential than a cam-shaft control system in an internal-combustion engine. Multi-cloud aggregations, cloud-computing services, virtual-machine containers and virtual machines, communications interfaces, and many of the other topics discussed below are tangible, physical components of physical, electro-optical-mechanical computer systems.

FIG. 1 provides a general architectural diagram for various types of computers. The computer system contains one or multiple central processing units (“CPUs”) 102-105, one or more electronic memories 108 interconnected with the CPUs by a CPU/memory-subsystem bus 110 or multiple busses, a first bridge 112 that interconnects the CPU/memory-subsystem bus 110 with additional busses 114 and 116, or other types of high-speed interconnection media, including multiple, high-speed serial interconnects. These busses or serial interconnections, in turn, connect the CPUs and memory with specialized processors, such as a graphics processor 118, and with one or more additional bridges 120, which are interconnected with high-speed serial links or with multiple controllers 122-127, such as controller 127, that provide access to various different types of mass-storage devices 128, electronic displays, input devices, and other such components, subcomponents, and computational resources. It should be noted that computer-readable data-storage devices include optical and electromagnetic disks, electronic memories, and other physical data-storage devices. Those familiar with modern science and technology appreciate that electromagnetic radiation and propagating signals do not store data for subsequent retrieval, and can transiently “store” only a byte or less of information per mile, far less information than needed to encode even the simplest of routines.

Of course, there are many different types of computer-system architectures that differ from one another in the number of different memories, including different types of hierarchical cache memories, the number of processors and the connectivity of the processors with other system components, the number of internal communications busses and serial links, and in many other ways. However, computer systems generally execute stored programs by fetching instructions from memory and executing the instructions in one or more processors. Computer systems include general-purpose computer systems, such as personal computers (“PCs”), various types of servers and workstations, and higher-end mainframe computers, but may also include a plethora of various types of special-purpose computing devices, including data-storage systems, communications routers, network nodes, tablet computers, and mobile telephones.

FIG. 2 illustrates an Internet-connected distributed computer system. As communications and networking technologies have evolved in capability and accessibility, and as the computational bandwidths, data-storage capacities, and other capabilities and capacities of various types of computer systems have steadily and rapidly increased, much of modern computing now generally involves large distributed systems and computers interconnected by local networks, wide-area networks, wireless communications, and the Internet. FIG. 2 shows a typical distributed system in which a large number of PCs 202-205, a high-end distributed mainframe system 210 with a large data-storage system 212, and a large computer center 214 with large numbers of rack-mounted servers or blade servers all interconnected through various communications and networking systems that together comprise the Internet 216. Such distributed computing systems provide diverse arrays of functionalities. For example, a PC user sitting in a home office may access hundreds of millions of different web sites provided by hundreds of thousands of different web servers throughout the world and may access high-computational-bandwidth computing services from remote computer facilities for running complex computational tasks.

Until recently, computational services were generally provided by computer systems and data centers purchased, configured, managed, and maintained by service-provider organizations. For example, an e-commerce retailer generally purchased, configured, managed, and maintained a data center including numerous web servers, back-end computer systems, and data-storage systems for serving web pages to remote customers, receiving orders through the web-page interface, processing the orders, tracking completed orders, and other myriad different tasks associated with an e-commerce enterprise.

FIG. 3 illustrates cloud computing. In the recently developed cloud-computing paradigm, computing cycles and data-storage facilities are provided to organizations and individuals by cloud-computing providers. In addition, larger organizations may elect to establish private cloud-computing facilities in addition to, or instead of, subscribing to computing services provided by public cloud-computing service providers. In FIG. 3, a system administrator for an organization, using a PC 302, accesses the organization's private cloud 304 through a local network 306 and private-cloud interface 308 and also accesses, through the Internet 310, a public cloud 312 through a public-cloud services interface 314. The administrator can, in either the case of the private cloud 304 or public cloud 312, configure virtual computer systems and even entire virtual data centers and launch execution of application programs on the virtual computer systems and virtual data centers in order to carry out any of many different types of computational tasks. As one example, a small organization may configure and run a virtual data center within a public cloud that executes web servers to provide an e-commerce interface through the public cloud to remote customers of the organization, such as a user viewing the organization's e-commerce web pages on a remote user system 316.

Cloud-computing facilities are intended to provide computational bandwidth and data-storage services much as utility companies provide electrical power and water to consumers. Cloud computing provides enormous advantages to small organizations without the resources to purchase, manage, and maintain in-house data centers. Such organizations can dynamically add and delete virtual computer systems from their virtual data centers within public clouds in order to track computational-bandwidth and data-storage needs, rather than purchasing sufficient computer systems within a physical data center to handle peak computational-bandwidth and data-storage demands. Moreover, small organizations can completely avoid the overhead of maintaining and managing physical computer systems, including hiring and periodically retraining information-technology specialists and continuously paying for operating-system and database-management-system upgrades. Furthermore, cloud-computing interfaces allow for easy and straightforward configuration of virtual computing facilities, flexibility in the types of applications and operating systems that can be configured, and other functionalities that are useful even for owners and administrators of private cloud-computing facilities used by a single organization.

FIG. 4 illustrates generalized hardware and software components of a general-purpose computer system, such as a general-purpose computer system having an architecture similar to that shown in FIG. 1. The computer system 400 is often considered to include three fundamental layers: (1) a hardware layer or level 402; (2) an operating-system layer or level 404; and (3) an application-program layer or level 406. The hardware layer 402 includes one or more processors 408, system memory 410, various different types of input-output (“I/O”) devices 410 and 412, and mass-storage devices 414. Of course, the hardware level also includes many other components, including power supplies, internal communications links and busses, specialized integrated circuits, many different types of processor-controlled or microprocessor-controlled peripheral devices and controllers, and many other components. The operating system 404 interfaces to the hardware level 402 through a low-level operating system and hardware interface 416 generally comprising a set of non-privileged computer instructions 418, a set of privileged computer instructions 420, a set of non-privileged registers and memory addresses 422, and a set of privileged registers and memory addresses 424. In general, the operating system exposes non-privileged instructions, non-privileged registers, and non-privileged memory addresses 426 and a system-call interface 428 as an operating-system interface 430 to application programs 432-436 that execute within an execution environment provided to the application programs by the operating system. The operating system, alone, accesses the privileged instructions, privileged registers, and privileged memory addresses. By reserving access to privileged instructions, privileged registers, and privileged memory addresses, the operating system can ensure that application programs and other higher-level computational entities cannot interfere with one another's execution and cannot change the overall state of the computer system in ways that could deleteriously impact system operation. The operating system includes many internal components and modules, including a scheduler 442, memory management 444, a file system 446, device drivers 448, and many other components and modules. To a certain degree, modern operating systems provide numerous levels of abstraction above the hardware level, including virtual memory, which provides to each application program and other computational entities a separate, large, linear memory-address space that is mapped by the operating system to various electronic memories and mass-storage devices. The scheduler orchestrates interleaved execution of various different application programs and higher-level computational entities, providing to each application program a virtual, stand-alone system devoted entirely to the application program. From the application program's standpoint, the application program executes continuously without concern for the need to share processor resources and other system resources with other application programs and higher-level computational entities. The device drivers abstract details of hardware-component operation, allowing application programs to employ the system-call interface for transmitting and receiving data to and from communications networks, mass-storage devices, and other I/O devices and subsystems. The file system 436 facilitates abstraction of mass-storage-device and memory resources as a high-level, easy-to-access, file-system interface. Thus, the development and evolution of the operating system has resulted in the generation of a type of multi-faceted virtual execution environment for application programs and other higher-level computational entities.

While the execution environments provided by operating systems have proved to be an enormously successful level of abstraction within computer systems, the operating-system-provided level of abstraction is nonetheless associated with difficulties and challenges for developers and users of application programs and other higher-level computational entities. One difficulty arises from the fact that there are many different operating systems that run within various different types of computer hardware. In many cases, popular application programs and computational systems are developed to run on only a subset of the available operating systems, and can therefore be executed within only a subset of the various different types of computer systems on which the operating systems are designed to run. Often, even when an application program or other computational system is ported to additional operating systems, the application program or other computational system can nonetheless run more efficiently on the operating systems for which the application program or other computational system was originally targeted. Another difficulty arises from the increasingly distributed nature of computer systems. Although distributed operating systems are the subject of considerable research and development efforts, many of the popular operating systems are designed primarily for execution on a single computer system. In many cases, it is difficult to move application programs, in real time, between the different computer systems of a distributed computer system for high-availability, fault-tolerance, and load-balancing purposes. The problems are even greater in heterogeneous distributed computer systems which include different types of hardware and devices running different types of operating systems. Operating systems continue to evolve, as a result of which certain older application programs and other computational entities may be incompatible with more recent versions of operating systems for which they are targeted, creating compatibility issues that are particularly difficult to manage in large distributed systems.

For all of these reasons, a higher level of abstraction, referred to as the “virtual machine,” has been developed and evolved to further abstract computer hardware in order to address many difficulties and challenges associated with traditional computing systems, including the compatibility issues discussed above. FIG. 5 illustrates one type of virtual machine and virtual-machine execution environment. FIG. 5 uses the same illustration conventions as used in FIG. 4. In particular, the computer system 500 in FIG. 5 includes the same hardware layer 502 as the hardware layer 402 shown in FIG. 4. However, rather than providing an operating system layer directly above the hardware layer, as in FIG. 4, the virtualized computing environment illustrated in FIG. 5 features a virtualization layer 504 that interfaces through a virtualization-layer/hardware-layer interface 506, equivalent to interface 416 in FIG. 4, to the hardware. The virtualization layer provides a hardware-like interface 508 to a number of virtual machines, such as virtual machine 510, executing above the virtualization layer in a virtual-machine layer 512. Each virtual machine includes one or more application programs or other higher-level computational entities packaged together with an operating system, such as application 514 and operating system 516 packaged together within virtual machine 510. Each virtual machine is thus equivalent to the operating-system layer 404 and application-program layer 406 in the general-purpose computer system shown in FIG. 4. Each operating system within a virtual machine interfaces to the virtualization-layer interface 508 rather than to the actual hardware interface 506. The virtualization layer partitions hardware resources into abstract virtual-hardware layers to which each operating system within a virtual machine interfaces. The operating systems within the virtual machines, in general, are unaware of the virtualization layer and operate as if they were directly accessing a true hardware interface. The virtualization layer ensures that each of the virtual machines currently executing within the virtual environment receive a fair allocation of underlying hardware resources and that all virtual machines receive sufficient resources to progress in execution. The virtualization-layer interface 508 may differ for different operating systems. For example, the virtualization layer is generally able to provide virtual hardware interfaces for a variety of different types of computer hardware. This allows, as one example, a virtual machine that includes an operating system designed for a particular computer architecture to run on hardware of a different architecture. The number of virtual machines need not be equal to the number of physical processors or even a multiple of the number of processors. The virtualization layer includes a virtual-machine-monitor module 518 that virtualizes physical processors in the hardware layer to create virtual processors on which each of the virtual machines executes. For execution efficiency, the virtualization layer attempts to allow virtual machines to directly execute non-privileged instructions and to directly access non-privileged registers and memory. However, when the operating system within a virtual machine accesses virtual privileged instructions, virtual privileged registers, and virtual privileged memory through the virtualization-layer interface 508, the accesses may result in execution of virtualization-layer code to simulate or emulate the privileged resources. The virtualization layer additionally includes a kernel module 520 that manages memory, communications, and data-storage machine resources on behalf of executing virtual machines. The kernel, for example, may maintain shadow page tables on each virtual machine so that hardware-level virtual-memory facilities can be used to process memory accesses. The kernel may additionally include routines that implement virtual communications and data-storage devices as well as device drivers that directly control the operation of underlying hardware communications and data-storage devices. Similarly, the kernel virtualizes various other types of I/O devices, including keyboards, optical-disk drives, and other such devices. The virtualization layer essentially schedules execution of virtual machines much like an operating system schedules execution of application programs, so that the virtual machines each execute within a complete and fully functional virtual hardware layer.

A virtual machine or virtual application, described below, is encapsulated within a data package for transmission, distribution, and loading into a virtual-execution environment. One public standard for virtual-machine encapsulation is referred to as the “open virtualization format” (“OVF”). The OVF standard specifies a format for digitally encoding a virtual machine within one or more data files. FIG. 6 illustrates an OVF package. An OVF package 602 includes an OVF descriptor 604, an OVF manifest 606, an OVF certificate 608, one or more disk-image files 610-611, and one or more resource files 612-614. The OVF package can be encoded and stored as a single file or as a set of files. The OVF descriptor 604 is an XML document 620 that includes a hierarchical set of elements, each demarcated by a beginning tag and an ending tag. The outermost, or highest-level, element is the envelope element, demarcated by tags 622 and 623. The next-level element includes a reference element 626 that includes references to all files that are part of the OVF package, a disk section 628 that contains meta information about all of the virtual disks included in the OVF package, a networks section 630 that includes meta information about all of the logical networks included in the OVF package, and a collection of virtual-machine configurations 632 which further includes hardware descriptions of each virtual machine 634. There are many additional hierarchical levels and elements within a typical OVF descriptor. The OVF descriptor is thus a self-describing, XML file that describes the contents of an OVF package. The OVF manifest 606 is a list of cryptographic-hash-function-generated digests 636 of the entire OVF package and of the various components of the OVF package. The OVF certificate 608 is an authentication certificate 640 that includes a digest of the manifest and that is cryptographically signed. Disk image files, such as disk image file 610, are digital encodings of the contents of virtual disks and resource files 612 are digitally encoded content, such as operating-system images. A virtual machine or a collection of virtual machines encapsulated together within a virtual application can thus be digitally encoded as one or more files within an OVF package that can be transmitted, distributed, and loaded using well-known tools for transmitting, distributing, and loading files. A virtual appliance is a software service that is delivered as a complete software stack installed within one or more virtual machines that is encoded within an OVF package.

The advent of virtual machines and virtual environments has alleviated many of the difficulties and challenges associated with traditional general-purpose computing. Machine and operating-system dependencies can be significantly reduced or entirely eliminated by packaging applications and operating systems together as virtual machines and virtual appliances that execute within virtual environments provided by virtualization layers running on many different types of computer hardware. A next level of abstraction, referred to as virtual data centers or virtual infrastructure, provide a data-center interface to virtual data centers computationally constructed within physical data centers. FIG. 7 illustrates virtual data centers provided as an abstraction of underlying physical-data-center hardware components. In FIG. 7, a physical data center 702 is shown below a virtual-interface plane 704. The physical data center consists of a virtual-data-center management server 706 and any of various different computers, such as PCs 708, on which a virtual-data-center management interface may be displayed to system administrators and other users. The physical data center additionally includes generally large numbers of server computers, such as server computer 710, that are coupled together by local area networks, such as local area network 712 that directly interconnects server computer 710 and 714-720 and a mass-storage array 722. The physical data center shown in FIG. 7 includes three local area networks 712, 724, and 726 that each directly interconnects a bank of eight servers and a mass-storage array. The individual server computers, such as server computer 710, each includes a virtualization layer and runs multiple virtual machines. Different physical data centers may include many different types of computers, networks, data-storage systems and devices connected according to many different types of connection topologies. The virtual-data-center abstraction layer 704, a logical abstraction layer shown by a plane in FIG. 7, abstracts the physical data center to a virtual data center comprising one or more resource pools, such as resource pools 730-732, one or more virtual data stores, such as virtual data stores 734-736, and one or more virtual networks. In certain implementations, the resource pools abstract banks of physical servers directly interconnected by a local area network.

The virtual-data-center management interface allows provisioning and launching of virtual machines with respect to resource pools, virtual data stores, and virtual networks, so that virtual-data-center administrators need not be concerned with the identities of physical-data-center components used to execute particular virtual machines. Furthermore, the virtual-data-center management server includes functionality to migrate running virtual machines from one physical server to another in order to optimally or near optimally manage resource allocation, provide fault tolerance, and high availability by migrating virtual machines to most effectively utilize underlying physical hardware resources, to replace virtual machines disabled by physical hardware problems and failures, and to ensure that multiple virtual machines supporting a high-availability virtual appliance are executing on multiple physical computer systems so that the services provided by the virtual appliance are continuously accessible, even when one of the multiple virtual appliances becomes compute bound, data-access bound, suspends execution, or fails. Thus, the virtual data center layer of abstraction provides a virtual-data-center abstraction of physical data centers to simplify provisioning, launching, and maintenance of virtual machines and virtual appliances as well as to provide high-level, distributed functionalities that involve pooling the resources of individual physical servers and migrating virtual machines among physical servers to achieve load balancing, fault tolerance, and high availability.

FIG. 8 illustrates virtual-machine components of a virtual-data-center management server and physical servers of a physical data center above which a virtual-data-center interface is provided by the virtual-data-center management server. The virtual-data-center management server 802 and a virtual-data-center database 804 comprise the physical components of the management component of the virtual data center. The virtual-data-center management server 802 includes a hardware layer 806 and virtualization layer 808, and runs a virtual-data-center management-server virtual machine 810 above the virtualization layer. Although shown as a single server in FIG. 8, the virtual-data-center management server (“VDC management server”) may include two or more physical server computers that support multiple VDC-management-server virtual appliances. The virtual machine 810 includes a management-interface component 812, distributed services 814, core services 816, and a host-management interface 818. The management interface is accessed from any of various computers, such as the PC 708 shown in FIG. 7. The management interface allows the virtual-data-center administrator to configure a virtual data center, provision virtual machines, collect statistics and view log files for the virtual data center, and to carry out other, similar management tasks. The host-management interface 818 interfaces to virtual-data-center agents 824, 825, and 826 that execute as virtual machines within each of the physical servers of the physical data center that is abstracted to a virtual data center by the VDC management server.

The distributed services 814 include a distributed-resource scheduler that assigns virtual machines to execute within particular physical servers and that migrates virtual machines in order to most effectively make use of computational bandwidths, data-storage capacities, and network capacities of the physical data center. The distributed services further include a high-availability service that replicates and migrates virtual machines in order to ensure that virtual machines continue to execute despite problems and failures experienced by physical hardware components. The distributed services also include a live-virtual-machine migration service that temporarily halts execution of a virtual machine, encapsulates the virtual machine in an OVF package, transmits the OVF package to a different physical server, and restarts the virtual machine on the different physical server from a virtual-machine state recorded when execution of the virtual machine was halted. The distributed services also include a distributed backup service that provides centralized virtual-machine backup and restore.

The core services provided by the VDC management server include host configuration, virtual-machine configuration, virtual-machine provisioning, generation of virtual-data-center alarms and events, ongoing event logging and statistics collection, a task scheduler, and a resource-management module. Each physical server 820-822 also includes a host-agent virtual machine 828-830 through which the virtualization layer can be accessed via a virtual-infrastructure application programming interface (“API”). This interface allows a remote administrator or user to manage an individual server through the infrastructure API. The virtual-data-center agents 824-826 access virtualization-layer server information through the host agents. The virtual-data-center agents are primarily responsible for offloading certain of the virtual-data-center management-server functions specific to a particular physical server to that physical server. The virtual-data-center agents relay and enforce resource allocations made by the VDC management server, relay virtual-machine provisioning and configuration-change commands to host agents, monitor and collect performance statistics, alarms, and events communicated to the virtual-data-center agents by the local host agents through the interface API, and to carry out other, similar virtual-data-management tasks.

The virtual-data-center abstraction provides a convenient and efficient level of abstraction for exposing the computational resources of a cloud-computing facility to cloud-computing-infrastructure users. A cloud-director management server exposes virtual resources of a cloud-computing facility to cloud-computing-infrastructure users. In addition, the cloud director introduces a multi-tenancy layer of abstraction, which partitions VDCs into tenant-associated VDCs that can each be allocated to a particular individual tenant or tenant organization, both referred to as a “tenant.” A given tenant can be provided one or more tenant-associated VDCs by a cloud director managing the multi-tenancy layer of abstraction within a cloud-computing facility. The cloud services interface (308 in FIG. 3) exposes a virtual-data-center management interface that abstracts the physical data center.

FIG. 9 illustrates a cloud-director level of abstraction. In FIG. 9, three different physical data centers 902-904 are shown below planes representing the cloud-director layer of abstraction 906-908. Above the planes representing the cloud-director level of abstraction, multi-tenant virtual data centers 910-912 are shown. The resources of these multi-tenant virtual data centers are securely partitioned in order to provide secure virtual data centers to multiple tenants, or cloud-services-accessing organizations. For example, a cloud-services-provider virtual data center 910 is partitioned into four different tenant-associated virtual-data centers within a multi-tenant virtual data center for four different tenants 916-919. Each multi-tenant virtual data center is managed by a cloud director comprising one or more cloud-director servers 920-922 and associated cloud-director databases 924-926. Each cloud-director server or servers runs a cloud-director virtual appliance 930 that includes a cloud-director management interface 932, a set of cloud-director services 934, and a virtual-data-center management-server interface 936. The cloud-director services include an interface and tools for provisioning multi-tenant virtual data center virtual data centers on behalf of tenants, tools and interfaces for configuring and managing tenant organizations, tools and services for organization of virtual data centers and tenant-associated virtual data centers within the multi-tenant virtual data center, services associated with template and media catalogs, and provisioning of virtualization networks from a network pool. Templates are virtual machines that each contains an OS and/or one or more virtual machines containing applications. A template may include much of the detailed contents of virtual machines and virtual appliances that are encoded within OVF packages, so that the task of configuring a virtual machine or virtual appliance is significantly simplified, requiring only deployment of one OVF package. These templates are stored in catalogs within a tenant's virtual-data center. These catalogs are used for developing and staging new virtual appliances and published catalogs are used for sharing templates in virtual appliances across organizations. Catalogs may include OS images and other information relevant to construction, distribution, and provisioning of virtual appliances.

Considering FIGS. 7 and 9, the VDC-server and cloud-director layers of abstraction can be seen, as discussed above, to facilitate employment of the virtual-data-center concept within private and public clouds. However, this level of abstraction does not fully facilitate aggregation of single-tenant and multi-tenant virtual data centers into heterogeneous or homogeneous aggregations of cloud-computing facilities.

FIG. 10 illustrates virtual-cloud-connector nodes (“VCC nodes”) and a VCC server, components of a distributed system that provides multi-cloud aggregation and that includes a cloud-connector server and cloud-connector nodes that cooperate to provide services that are distributed across multiple clouds. VMware vCloud™ VCC servers and nodes are one example of VCC server and nodes. In FIG. 10, seven different cloud-computing facilities are illustrated 1002-1008. Cloud-computing facility 1002 is a private multi-tenant cloud with a cloud director 1010 that interfaces to a VDC management server 1012 to provide a multi-tenant private cloud comprising multiple tenant-associated virtual data centers. The remaining cloud-computing facilities 1003-1008 may be either public or private cloud-computing facilities and may be single-tenant virtual data centers, such as virtual data centers 1003 and 1006, multi-tenant virtual data centers, such as multi-tenant virtual data centers 1004 and 1007-1008, or any of various different kinds of third-party cloud-services facilities, such as third-party cloud-services facility 1005. An additional component, the VCC server 1014, acting as a controller is included in the private cloud-computing facility 1002 and interfaces to a VCC node 1016 that runs as a virtual appliance within the cloud director 1010. A VCC server may also run as a virtual appliance within a VDC management server that manages a single-tenant private cloud. The VCC server 1014 additionally interfaces, through the Internet, to VCC node virtual appliances executing within remote VDC management servers, remote cloud directors, or within the third-party cloud services 1018-1023. The VCC server provides a VCC server interface that can be displayed on a local or remote terminal, PC, or other computer system 1026 to allow a cloud-aggregation administrator or other user to access VCC-server-provided aggregate-cloud distributed services. In general, the cloud-computing facilities that together faun a multiple-cloud-computing aggregation through distributed services provided by the VCC server and VCC nodes are geographically and operationally distinct.

FIG. 11 illustrates the VCC server and VCC nodes in a slightly different fashion than the VCC server and VCC nodes are illustrated in FIG. 10. In FIG. 11, the VCC server virtual machine 1102 is shown executing within a VCC server 1104, one or more physical servers located within a private cloud-computing facility. The VCC-server virtual machine includes a VCC-server interface 1106 through which a terminal, PC, or other computing device 1108 interfaces to the VCC server. The VCC server, upon request, displays a VCC-server user interface on the computing device 1108 to allow a cloud-aggregate administrator or other user to access VCC-server-provided functionality. The VCC-server virtual machine additionally includes a VCC-node interface 1108 through which the VCC server interfaces to VCC-node virtual appliances that execute within VDC management servers, cloud directors, and third-party cloud-computing facilities. As shown in FIG. 11, in one implementation, a VCC-node virtual machine is associated with each organization configured within and supported by a cloud director. Thus, VCC nodes 1112-1114 execute as virtual appliances within cloud director 1116 in association with organizations 1118-1120, respectively. FIG. 11 shows a VCC-node virtual machine 1122 executing within a third-party cloud-computing facility and a VCC-node virtual machine 1124 executing within a VDC management server. The VCC server, including the services provided by the VCC-server virtual machine 1102, in conjunction with the VCC-node virtual machines running within remote VDC management servers, cloud directors, and within third-party cloud-computing facilities, together provide functionality distributed among the cloud-computing-facility components of either heterogeneous or homogeneous cloud-computing aggregates.

FIG. 12 illustrates one implementation of a VCC node. The VCC node 1200 is a web service that executes within an Apache/Tomcat container that runs as a virtual appliance within a cloud director, VDC management server, or third-party cloud-computing server. The VCC node exposes web services 1202 to a remote VCC server via REST APIs accessed through the representational state transfer (“REST”) protocol 1204 via a hypertext transfer protocol (“HTTP”) proxy server 1206. The REST protocol uses HTTP requests to post data and requests for services, read data and receive service-generated responses, and delete data. The web services 1202 comprise a set of internal functions that are called to execute the REST APIs 1204. Authorization services are provided by a spring security layer 1208. The internal functions that implement the web services exposed by the REST APIs employ a metadata/object-store layer implemented using an SQL Server database 1210-1212, a storage layer 1214 with adapters 1216-1219 provides access to data stores 1220, file systems 1222, the virtual-data-center management-server management interface 1224, and the cloud-director management interface 1226. These adapters may additional include adapters to 3^(rd)-party cloud management services, interfaces, and systems. The internal functions that implement the web services may also access a message protocol 1230 and network transfer services 1232 that allow for transfer of OVF packages and other files securely between VCC nodes via virtual networks 1234 that virtualize underlying physical networks 1236. The message protocol 1230 and network transfer services 1232 together provide for secure data transfer, multipart messaging, and checkpoint-restart data transfer that allows failed data transfers to be restarted from most recent checkpoints, rather than having to be entirely retransmitted.

FIG. 13 illustrates electronic communications between a client and server computer. The following discussion of FIG. 13 provides an overview of electronic communications. This is, however, a very large and complex subject area, a full discussion of which would likely run for many hundreds or thousands of pages. The following overview is provided as a basis for discussing communications stacks, with reference to subsequent figures. In FIG. 13, a client computer 1302 is shown to be interconnected with a server computer 1304 via local communication links 1306 and 1308 and a complex distributed intermediary communications system 1310, such as the Internet. This complex communications system may include a large number of individual computer systems and many types of electronic communications media, including wide-area networks, public switched telephone networks, wireless communications, satellite communications, and many other types of electronics-communications systems and intermediate computer systems, routers, bridges, and other device and system components. Both the server and client computers are shown to include three basic internal layers including an applications layer 1312 in the client computer and a corresponding applications and services layer 1314 in the server computer, an operating-system layer 1316 and 1318, and a hardware layer 1320 and 1322. The server computer 1304 is additionally associated with an internal, peripheral, or remote data-storage subsystem 1324. The hardware layers 1320 and 1322 may include the components discussed above with reference to FIG. 1 as well as many additional hardware components and subsystems, such as power supplies, cooling fans, switches, auxiliary processors, and many other mechanical, electrical, electromechanical, and electro-optical-mechanical components. The operating system 1316 and 1318 represents the general control system of both a client computer 1302 and a server computer 1304. The operating system interfaces to the hardware layer through a set of registers that, under processor control, are used for transferring data, including commands and stored information, between the operating system and various hardware components. The operating system also provides a complex execution environment in which various application programs, including database management systems, web browsers, web services, and other application programs execute. In many cases, modern computer systems employ an additional layer between the operating system and the hardware layer, referred to as a “virtualization layer,” that interacts directly with the hardware and provides a virtual-hardware-execution environment for one or more operating systems.

Client systems may include any of many types of processor-controlled devices, including tablet computers, laptop computers, mobile smart phones, and other such processor-controlled devices. These various types of clients may include only a subset of the components included in a desktop personal component as well components not generally included in desktop personal computers.

Electronic communications between computer systems generally comprises packets of information, referred to as datagrams, transferred from client computers to server computers and from server computers to client computers. In many cases, the communications between computer systems is commonly viewed from the relatively high level of an application program which uses an application-layer protocol for information transfer. However, the application-layer protocol is implemented on top of additional layers, including a transport layer, Internet layer, and link layer. These layers are commonly implemented at different levels within computer systems. Each layer is associated with a protocol for data transfer between corresponding layers of computer systems. These layers of protocols are commonly referred to as a “protocol stack.” In FIG. 13, a representation of a common protocol stack 1330 is shown below the interconnected server and client computers 1304 and 1302. The layers are associated with layer numbers, such as layer number “1” 1332 associated with the application layer 1334. These same layer numbers are used in the depiction of the interconnection of the client computer 1302 with the server computer 1304, such as layer number “1” 1332 associated with a horizontal dashed line 1336 that represents interconnection of the application layer 1312 of the client computer with the applications/services layer 1314 of the server computer through an application-layer protocol. A dashed line 1336 represents interconnection via the application-layer protocol in FIG. 13, because this interconnection is logical, rather than physical. Dashed-line 1338 represents the logical interconnection of the operating-system layers of the client and server computers via a transport layer. Dashed line 1340 represents the logical interconnection of the operating systems of the two computer systems via an Internet-layer protocol. Finally, links 1306 and 1308 and cloud 1310 together represent the physical communications media and components that physically transfer data from the client computer to the server computer and from the server computer to the client computer. These physical communications components and media transfer data according to a link-layer protocol. In FIG. 13, a second table 1342 is aligned with the table 1330 that illustrates the protocol stack includes example protocols that may be used for each of the different protocol layers. The hypertext transfer protocol (“HTTP”) may be used as the application-layer protocol 1344, the transmission control protocol (“TCP”) 1346 may be used as the transport-layer protocol, the Internet protocol 1348 (“IP”) may be used as the Internet-layer protocol, and, in the case of a computer system interconnected through a local Ethernet to the Internet, the Ethernet/IEEE 802.3u protocol 1350 may be used for transmitting and receiving information from the computer system to the complex communications components of the Internet. Within cloud 1310, which represents the Internet, many additional types of protocols may be used for transferring the data between the client computer and server computer.

Consider the sending of a message, via the HTTP protocol, from the client computer to the server computer. An application program generally makes a system call to the operating system and includes, in the system call, an indication of the recipient to whom the data is to be sent as well as a reference to a buffer that contains the data. The data and other information are packaged together into one or more HTTP datagrams, such as datagram 1352. The datagram may generally include a header 1354 as well as the data 1356, encoded as a sequence of bytes within a block of memory. The header 1354 is generally a record composed of multiple byte-encoded fields. The call by the application program to an application-layer system call is represented in FIG. 13 by solid vertical arrow 1358. The operating system employs a transport-layer protocol, such as TCP, to transfer one or more application-layer datagrams that together represent an application-layer message. In general, when the application-layer message exceeds some threshold number of bytes, the message is sent as two or more transport-layer messages. Each of the transport-layer messages 1360 includes a transport-layer-message header 1362 and an application-layer datagram 1352. The transport-layer header includes, among other things, sequence numbers that allow a series of application-layer datagrams to be reassembled into a single application-layer message. The transport-layer protocol is responsible for end-to-end message transfer independent of the underlying network and other communications subsystems, and is additionally concerned with error control, segmentation, as discussed above, flow control, congestion control, application addressing, and other aspects of reliable end-to-end message transfer. The transport-layer datagrams are then forwarded to the Internet layer via system calls within the operating system and are embedded within Internet-layer datagrams 1364, each including an Internet-layer header 1366 and a transport-layer datagram. The Internet layer of the protocol stack is concerned with sending datagrams across the potentially many different communications media and subsystems that together comprise the Internet. This involves routing of messages through the complex communications systems to the intended destination. The Internet layer is concerned with assigning unique addresses, known as “IP addresses,” to both the sending computer and the destination computer for a message and routing the message through the Internet to the destination computer. Internet-layer datagrams are finally transferred, by the operating system, to communications hardware, such as a NIC, which embeds the Internet-layer datagram 1364 into a link-layer datagram 1370 that includes a link-layer header 1372 and generally includes a number of additional bytes 1374 appended to the end of the Internet-layer datagram. The link-layer header includes collision-control and error-control information as well as local-network addresses. The link-layer packet or datagram 1370 is a sequence of bytes that includes information introduced by each of the layers of the protocol stack as well as the actual data that is transferred from the source computer to the destination computer according to the application-layer protocol.

FIG. 14 illustrates another model for network communications used to interconnect consumers of services with service-providing applications running within server computers. The Windows Communication Foundation (“WCF”) model for network communications used to interconnect consumers of services with service-providing applications running within server computers. In FIG. 14, a server computer 1402 is shown to be interconnected with a service-consuming application running on a user computer 1404 via communications stacks of the WCF that exchange data through a physical communications medium or media 1406. As shown in FIG. 14, the communications are based on the client/server model in which the service-consuming application transmits requests to the service application running on the service computer and the service application transmits responses to those requests back to the service-consuming application. The communications stack on the server computer includes an endpoint 1408, a number of protocol channels 1410, a transport channel 1412, various lower-level layers implemented in an operating system or both in an operating system and a virtualization layer 1414, and the hardware NIC peripheral device 1416. Similar layers reside within the user computer 1404. As also indicated in FIG. 14, the endpoint, protocol channels, and transport channel all execute in user mode, along with the service application 1420 within the server computer 1402 and, on the user computer, the service-consuming application 1422, endpoint 1424, protocol channels 1426, and transport channel 1428 also execute in user mode 1430. The OS layers 1414 and 1432 execute either in an operating system or in a guest operating system and underlying virtualization layer.

An endpoint (1408 and 1424) encapsulates the information and logic needed by a service application to receive requests from service consumers and respond to those requests, on the server side, and encapsulate the information and logic needed by a client to transmit requests to a remote service application and receive responses to those requests. Endpoints can be defined either programmatically or in Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) configuration files. An endpoint logically consists of an address represented by an endpoint address class containing a universal resource identifier (“URI”) property and an authentication property, a service contract, and a binding that specifies the identities and orders of various protocol channels and the transport channel within the communications stack underlying the endpoint and overlying the various lower, operating-system- or guest-operating-system layers and the NIC hardware. The contract specifies a set of operations or methods supported by the endpoint. The data type of each parameter or return value in the methods associated with an endpoint are associated with a data-contract attribute that specifies how the data type is serialized and deserialized. Each protocol channel represents one or more protocols applied to a message or packet to achieve one of various different types of goals, including security of data within the message, reliability of message transmission and delivery, message formatting, and other such goals. The transport channel is concerned with transmission of data streams or datagrams through remote computers, and may include error detection and correction, flow control, congestion control, and other such aspects of data transmission. Well-known transport protocols include the hypertext transport protocol (“HTTP”), the transmission control protocol (“TCP”), the user datagram protocol (“UDP”), and the simple network management protocol (“SNMP”). In general, lower-level communications tasks, including Internet-protocol addressing and routing, are carried out within the operating-system- or operating-system-and-virtualization layers 1414 and 1432.

The Open Systems Interconnection (“OSI”) model is often used to describe network communications. The OSI model includes seven different layers, including: (1) a physical layer, L1, that describes a physical communications component, including a communications medium and characteristics of the signal transmitted through the medium; (2) a data-link layer, L2, that describes datagram exchange over the L1 layer and physical address; (3) a network layer, L3, that describes packet and datagram exchange through the L2 layer, including oath determination and logical addressing; (4) a transport layer, L4, that describes end-to-end connection of two communicating entities, reliability, and flow control; (5) a sessions layer, L5, that describes management of sessions, or multi-packet data transmission contexts; (6) a presentation layer, L6, that describes data representation, data encryption, and machine-independent data; and an application layer, L7, that describes the interconnection of applications, including client and server applications.

FIG. 15 illustrates a virtual application. As discussed above, virtualization can be viewed as a layer 1502 above the hardware layer 1504 of a computer system that supports execution of a virtual machine layer 1506, in turn supporting execution of an operating system 1508 and one or more application programs 1510 executing in an execution environment provided by the operating system, virtual machine, virtualization layer, and hardware. Another abstraction provided by a virtualization layer is a virtual application or vApp. A vApp 1512 is a resource container that includes one or more virtual machines that are grouped together to form an application. In the example shown in FIG. 15, vApp 1512 includes three different virtual-machine/OS/application entities 1514-1516. These three different entities may include, as one example, a web front end server and two database servers. The computational entities within a vApp can be easily deployed and started up and shut down, in similar fashion to the deployment, starting up, and shutting down of individual virtual machines. The vApp also provides an additional layer of abstraction within a virtualized computing environment that may be associated with a vApp-specific security layer to allow securing of groups of virtual machines under a common security scheme.

Just as physical data-storage devices and physical servers are virtualized by a virtualization layer, the networking resources within a physical data center are also virtualized by a virtualization layer to provide various types of virtualized networking facilities. FIG. 16 illustrates virtualization of networking facilities within a physical data center. As shown in FIG. 16, a physical data center 1602 may include a large number of enclosures containing multiple servers, such as enclosure 1604, and network-attached data-storage subsystems linked together by several local-area networks 1606 and 1608 interconnected through bridging, switching, firewall, and load-balancing appliances 1610 connected to a VPN gateway appliance 1612 through which the physical data center is interconnected with the Internet 1614 and other wide-area networks. The virtualization layer 1616, as discussed above, creates multiple virtual data centers 1618 and 1620 that execute within the physical data center, each having one or more internal organization networks 1622 and 1624 that allow intercommunication between virtual machines and vApps executing within the data centers and that may also provide interconnection with remote computational entities via virtual external networks 1626 and 1628 that interconnect the internal organization virtual networks 1622 and 1624 with the Internet and other wide-area networks. In addition, there may be internal networks, including networks 1630 and 1632, within individual vApps. Isolated virtual internal vApp networks, such as internal virtual network 1632, allow the virtual machines within a vApp to intercommunicate while other types of virtual internal networks, including routed virtual internal networks, such as virtual network 1632, provide connectivity between one or more virtual machines executing within the vApp to other virtual machines executing within a given virtual data center as well as remote machines via the virtual organization network 1632 and virtual external network 1626. The virtual internal routed network 1630 is associated with an edge virtual appliance 1634 that runs as a virtual machine within the virtual data center. The edge appliance provides a firewall, isolation of the subnetwork within the vApp from the organization of virtual network 1622 and other networks to which it is connected, and a variety of networking services, including virtual private network connections to other edge appliances, network address translation to allow virtual machines within the vApp to intercommunicate with remote computational entities, and dynamic host configuration protocol facilities (“DHCP”). Virtual private networks employ encryption and other techniques to create an isolated, virtual network interconnecting two or more computational entities within one or more communications networks, including local area networks and wide-area networks, such as the Internet. One type of VPN is based on the secure sockets layer and is referred to as the secure socket layer virtual private network (“SSL VPN”). Another type of VPN is referred to as an Internet-protocol-security VPN (“IPsec”).

In general, an edge appliance isolates an interior subnetwork, on one side of the edge appliance, from an exterior network, such as the Internet. Computational entities, such as virtual machines, within the interior subnetwork can use local network addresses that are mapped, by the edge appliance, to global Internet addresses in order to provide connectivity between the edge appliance and computational entities within the interior subnetwork to remote computer systems. An edge appliance essentially multiplex a small number of global network addresses among the computational entities within the subnetwork, in many cases using pools of port numbers distributed within the internal subnetwork. Just as edge appliance 1634 provides gateway services and isolation to the computational entities interconnected by a virtual routed interior network 1630 within a vApp, additional edge appliances 1636 and 1638 may provide similar gateway services to all the computational entities interconnected by an organization virtual network 1622 and 1624 within virtual data centers 1618 and 1620, respectively.

Inter-Cloud VPNs Created and Managed by a Virtual Cloud-Connector Server and Virtual Cloud-Connector Nodes

FIG. 17 shows an organization virtual data center 1702 in a first cloud-computing facility 1704 and an organization virtual data center 1706 in a second cloud-computing facility 1708 that is used, in the following discussion, as an example multi-cloud environment 1700 in which a VPN is created. In this example, the same organization controls both virtual data centers 1702 and 1706. The first cloud-computing facility 1704 (“first cloud”) may be a private cloud-computing facility that is owned and managed by the organization and the second cloud-computing facility 1708 (“second cloud”) may be a public cloud-computing facility from which the organization rents computational resources that are virtualized by the organization virtual data center 1706.

Each VDC 1702 and 1704 includes a virtual organization network 1710 and 1712, respectively. Each virtualization organization network interconnects to a virtual external network 1714 and 1716, respectively, through an organization edge appliance 1718 and 1720, respectively. Each VDC also includes a VCC node, 1715 and 1717, respectively. The virtual external networks are implemented within one or more physical networks that provide interconnection of the external networks through the Internet 1722. VDC 1702 within the first cloud includes two vApps 1724 and 1726, each with an internal virtual routed vApp network 1728 and 1730, respectively, that each interconnects with the virtual organization network 1710 through an edge appliance 1732 and 1734, respectively. Each vApp 1724 and 1726 includes three virtual machines 1736-1738 and 1740-142, respectively. The second VDC 1706 in the second cloud 1708 also includes two vApps 1746 and 1748, each with an internal virtual routed vApp network 1750 and 1752, respectively, that each interconnects with the virtual organization network 1712 through an edge appliance 1754 and 1756, respectively. Each vApp 1746 and 1748 includes three virtual machines 1760-1762 and 1764-1766, respectively. Both the VDC 1706 in the first cloud and the VDC 1708 in the target cloud include catalog facilities 1768 and 1770, respectively, that allows the organization to publish vApp templates and VM templates for access by VDCs in remote clouds. The multi-cloud resources are managed by a VCC server 1770, similar to the VCC server 1014 in FIG. 10, in cooperation with VCC nodes 1715 and 1717. The VCC server may be located in either of the two cloud-computing facilities 1702 and 1706 or in another cloud-computing facility or location not shown in FIG. 17.

The Internet Protocol Security (“IPsec”) protocol is a communications protocol for securing IP communications. IPsec authenticates and encrypts each IP packet of a communication session, with information for mutual authentication as well as encryption keys exchanged between communications endpoints prior to initiation of a communications session. The endpoints can be host computers and/or security gateways. IPsec supports creation of Layer 2 tunnels to support virtual private networks. Higher level multi-packet messages, handled as Layer 3 entities by higher-level protocol layers, are protected by the Layer 2 encryption of datagrams without modifications to the higher-level protocols.

FIGS. 18A-F illustrate an IPsec tunnel. FIG. 18A shows two organization edge appliances 1802 and 1804 within cloud-computing facilities, such as organization edge appliances 1718 and 1720 in FIG. 17. The two organization edge appliances 1802 and 1804 are associated with IP addresses A100 (1806 in FIG. 18A) and A200 (1808 in FIG. 18A), respectively. These addresses are short, hypothetical addresses used for simplicity of illustration. Actual IP addresses are 32-bit or 128-bit integers that are often displayed as groups of decimal digits separated by commas. The two organization edge appliances 1802 and 1804 are connected, through local and wide-area networks 1810-1811, to one another through the Internet 1812, just as organization edge appliances 1718 and 1720 in FIG. 17 are interconnected to the Internet 1722 through virtual external networks 1714 and 1716. FIG. 18A also shows numerous VMs as small rectangles, such as rectangle 1814, each associated with an internal, IP-like address, such as the address represented by the symbol string “a1” associated with VM 1814. The internal, IP-like addresses are used by the VMs for sending and receiving packets or datagrams to and from other VMs interconnected by a virtual private network that includes internal virtual networks 1816 and 1818 within VDCs that execute within each cloud-computing facility, logic and routing tables within organization edge appliances 1802 and 1804, and the IPsec Layer 2 tunnel. The VMs in the left-hand column 1820 in FIG. 18A can be considered to represent VMs 1736-1738 and 1740-1742 that execute within VDC 1702 in the example of FIG. 17 and the VMs in the right-hand column 1821 in FIG. 18A can be considered to represent VMs 1760-1762 and 1764-1766 that execute within VDC 1706 in the example of FIG. 17. In FIG. 18A, the IPsec tunnel is represented by dashed lines 1822-1823 to indicate that the IPsec tunnel is an abstraction implemented with logic, data structures, and physical computing and networking hardware.

The internal IP addresses used by VMs for communication with other VMs within the virtual private network are distributed to the VMs from a pool of internal IP addresses allocated to the virtual private network by a VCC server, through VCC nodes, to organization edge appliances 1802 and 1804 as well as to edge appliances associated with vApps and VMs that handle packet or datagram traffic on behalf of the VMs that participate in the virtual private network. The organization edge appliances and/or edge appliances associated with vApps and VMs that handle packet or datagram traffic on behalf of the VMs that participate in the virtual private network also include various encoded policies and rules that govern how the virtual private network operates as well as routing tables that are used to direct datagrams or packets to their destinations along paths of local and wide-area networks linked through routers, bridges, and other computational devices.

FIGS. 18B-F illustrate operation of the IPsec tunnel and virtual private network. In FIG. 18B, VM 1814 sends a datagram through a local virtual internal vApp network to VM 1826 associated with internal VPN address “a15” 1828. The datagram 1824 includes a header that, in turn, includes a destination address 1830 and a source address 1832. The destination address “a15” directs the datagram to VM 1826 and the source address “a1” indicates that VM 1814 is the source VM of the datagram.

In FIG. 1 SC, the datagram 1824 is routed through the VDC virtual network or networks to organization edge appliance 1802. The organization edge appliance 1802 determines, from internal routing tables, that internal VPN address “a15” is located in a remote cloud computing facility and therefore needs to be transmitted to that remote cloud-computing facility through the IPsec tunnel. As a first step in IPsec tunnel transmission, the datagram is encrypted, as shown by arrow and cross-hatched encrypted datagram 1836. An encryption key associated with the IPsec tunnel is employed to encrypt the datagram. Next, as shown in FIG. 18D, the encrypted datagram 1836 is packaged within a carrier datagram 1838 for transmission through the Internet to the remote cloud computing facility. The carrier datagram 1838 includes a header that, in turn, includes a destination address 1840 and a source address 1842. The destination address “A200” directs the carrier datagram to organization edge appliance 1804 in the remote cloud-computing facility and the source address “A100” indicates that organization edge appliance 1802 the source of the carrier datagram. In FIG. 18E, the carrier datagram has been transmitted through the Internet to organization edge appliance 1804, where, as indicated by arrow 1846, encrypted datagram 1836 is extracted from the carrier datagram 1838. Encrypted datagram 1836 is then decrypted, using a decryption key associated with the IPsec tunnel, as indicated by arrow 1848, to recover the original datagram 1824 transmitted from VM 1814. Organization edge appliance 1804 then uses an internal routing table that includes entries for VPN addresses to direct the datagram through an appropriate internal virtual network to an edge appliance associated with the destination VM or a vApp that includes the destination VM 1826.

FIGS. 19A-H illustrate a hypothetical VCC-server administration interface displayed to a system administrator through a console PC or workstation. As shown in FIG. 19A, the administration interface 1900 includes a listing of information about the distributed resources managed by the VCC server on behalf of an organization, in this case the resources discussed above with reference to FIG. 17. In FIGS. 19A-H, the specific information shown for a particular resource is represented by a rectangular information-display sub-window, such as rectangular information-display sub-window 1902 that displays information about the first cloud 1704. The resources for which information is displayed include the first and second VDCs 1702 and 1706, information for which is displayed in information-display sub-windows 1904 and 1906, respectively, organization networks 1710 and 1712, information for which is displayed in information-display sub-windows 1908 and 1910, respectively, organization edge appliances 1718 and 1720, information for which is displayed in information-display sub-windows 1912 and 1914, respectively, vApps 1724, 1726, 1746, and 1748, information for which is displayed in information-display sub-windows 1916-1919, respectively, and VMs 1736-1738, 1740-1742, 1760-1762, and 1764-1766, information for which is displayed in information-display sub-windows 1920-1931, respectively. For simplicity of illustration, and because many different types of information may be displayed in different contexts and implementations, the information-display sub-windows are shown as blank boxes, in FIGS. 19A-H.

The administration interface 1900 additionally includes a configuration-task-selection window 1940. This allows an administrator to select a configuration task to carry out with respect to an organization's distributed, cloud-based resources. In FIG. 19B, a user has moved a cursor 1942 over the configuration-task-selection window and input a mouse click, resulting is display of a drop-down list of configuration tasks for selection. In FIG. 19C, the user moves a cursor to select the “inter-cloud VPN” selection 1946. In FIG. 19D, as a result of user selection of the inter-cloud-VPN task, input-entry features 1948-1953 are displayed to allow a user to indicate the organization networks within VDCs to be connected by a new VPN. Some administration-interface implementations may allow drag-and-drop style input, while others may involve typing at least a portion of various identifiers into the input features.

Following administrator identification of the organization networks to be interconnected by a VPN, the administration interface, as shown in FIG. 19E, indicates 1956 to the administrator that an IPsec tunnel has not yet been created to connect the two organization-edge appliances associated with the two organization networks to be interconnected by a VPN, and requests the administrator to choose to create a new tunnel or abandon the operation. After the administrator indicates a desire to continue, the administration interface, as shown in FIG. 19F, provides a VPN-membership-entry window 1958 that allows, as shown in FIG. 19G, the user to drag and drop, or type in, the various VMs to be interconnected by a new VPN. When the VPN membership has been specified, the user clicks a “done” input feature 1960. At this point, the administration interface, as shown in FIG. 19H, displays a list of various configuration choices and policy choices 1962 which the user can select for the new VPN. Any of many different types of rules, configuration parameters, and policies may be specified for the VPN and enforced by edge appliances, including maximum data transfers per unit time, number of retries for failed transmissions, types of encryption and other security measures to use, whether or not messages can be transmitted to a set of destinations, only some of which are VPN members, and other such rules, configuration parameters, and policies. The interface for specification of additional configuration information, rules, and policies may be complex and may allow for creation of new policies and rules in addition to selection from already existing policies and rules.

FIGS. 20A-B illustrate VCC-server and VCC-node roles in establishment of inter-cloud VPNs. FIGS. 20A-B show the same example multi-cloud environment shown in FIG. 17. As shown in FIG. 20A, the VCC server and VCC nodes 1770, 1715, and 1717 cooperate to create an IPsec tunnel 1772 between organization edge appliances 1718 and 1720. The VCC server passes 1774 and 1776 configuration information for the IPsec tunnel, which may include authorization-related and encryption-related information as well as various rules and policies, to VCC nodes 1715 and 1717 which, in turn, pass the information locally 1778 and 1780 to organization-edge appliances 1718 and 1720. The organization-edge appliances then establish the IPsec tunnel linking the two cloud-computing facilities together through the organization-edge appliances. As shown in FIG. 20B, when requested through the administration interface, discussed with reference to FIGS. 19A-H, or through other types of interfaces, to create a new VPN with VM membership indicated ion FIG. 19G, the VCC server allocates internal IP virtual-private-network addresses for a new VPN and passes the internal IP virtual-private-network addresses 1782 and 1784, along with configuration information for the new VPN, which may include a list of members, as well as various rules and policies, to VCC nodes 1715 and 1717 which, in turn, pass the information locally 1786-1789 to organization-edge appliances 1718 and 1720 and edge appliances 1732 and 1756. The organization-edge appliances then establish the VPN by configuring appropriate routing tables internally and within edge appliances 1732 and 1756 as well as distributing additional VPN-related configuration information, rules, and policies to edge appliances 1732 and 1756. Once the routing tables are in place, the internal IP virtual-private-network addresses are allocated and distributed to edge appliances and, ultimately, to VM and vApp members of the VPN, and the configuration information, rules, and policies are distributed to the edge appliances, the VM members of the new VPN 1736, 1738, and 1766 can begin communicating securely via the new VPN.

FIGS. 21A-B illustrate the incorporation of inter-cloud VPN creation into the VCC server management interface. As shown in FIG. 21A, the VCC-server management interface can be considered to be fundamentally an event loop. The management interface waits, in step 2102, for a next management-interface event, such as user input, and then processes the event through a call to an event handler. For example, when the event corresponds to user input that requests creation of an inter-cloud VPN, as determined in step 2104, then the create-VPN event handler 2106 is called. Other user inputs to carry out other management operations, such as launching a vApp 2106 or carrying out a stretch-deploy operation 2108 are handled by appropriate handlers 2110 and 2112, respectively. Ellipses 2114 indicates there may be any number of different event-detection and event-handling pairs, such as event-detection step 2104 and the associated handler 2106, in the event loop. A default handler 2116 handles any events not specifically recognized in the above event-detection/handler pairs.

FIG. 21B shows a high-level control-flow diagram for one implementation of the handler “create VPN,” called in step 2106 of FIG. 21A. In step 2118, the administration interface carries out a dialog with a user of the administration interface in which the user requests creation of a new inter-cloud VPN. In step 2120, the administration interface, provided by a VCC server, requests and receives endpoint information from the user, as discussed with reference to FIG. 19D. When the endpoints are not currently connected by an IPsec tunnel that can be used for the requested new VPN, as determined in step 2122, the administration interface requests and receives, in step 2124, permission to create the IPsec tunnel, as discussed with reference to FIG. 19E. When the user indicates a desire to proceed with IPsec tunnel creation, as determined in step 2126, then the VCC server, in cooperation with VCC nodes within relevant cloud-computing facilities, creates the IPsec tunnel, in step 2128, as discussed above with reference to FIG. 20A. Otherwise, VPN creation is terminated without creation of the new VPN. In step 2130, the administration interface requests and receives vApp and VM membership information, as discussed with reference to FIGS. 19F-G. In step 2132, the administration interface requests and receives indication of configuration information, rules, and policies that the user wishes to associate with the new VPN, as discussed with reference to FIG. 19H. Finally, in step 2134, the VCC server, in cooperation with VCC nodes, establishes the new VPN, as discussed above with reference to FIG. 20B.

Although the present invention has been described in terms of particular embodiments, it is not intended that the invention be limited to these embodiments. Modifications within the spirit of the invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art. For example, an inter-cloud-VPN creation and configuration utility may implemented in many different ways by varying any of many different design, implementation, and deployment parameters, including the virtualization layer in which the inter-cloud-VPN creation and configuration utility operation is implemented, programming language, control structures, data structures, modular organization, and other such design and implementation parameters. In the above-discussed implementation of a inter-cloud-VPN creation and configuration utility, only two organization networks are interconnected by an inter-cloud VPN. In alternative implementations, more than two organization networks can be interconnected through two or more IPsec tunnels by inter-cloud VPNs. In certain cases, a full pair-wise interconnection of secure tunnels is made while, in other cases, the organization networks in different cloud-computing facilities may be interconnected in star, chain, or various graph-like or tree-like topologies. In alternative implementations, an SSL VPN tunnel may be used instead of an IPsec tunnel to securely interconnect virtual organization networks.

It is appreciated that the previous description of the disclosed embodiments is provided to enable any person skilled in the art to make or use the present disclosure. Various modifications to these embodiments will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, and the generic principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments without departing from the spirit or scope of the disclosure. Thus, the present disclosure is not intended to be limited to the embodiments shown herein but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and novel features disclosed herein. 

The invention claimed is:
 1. A cloud-connector subsystem that provides a virtual private cloud operation for creating virtual private clouds distributed across a first and a second cloud-computing facility, the cloud- connector subsystem comprising: cloud-connector nodes associated with each of the first and second cloud-computing facilities; and a cloud-connector server that includes one or more processors, one or more memories, one or more data-storage devices, and computer instructions that, when executed on the one or more processors, control the cloud-connector server to provide, in cooperation with the cloud- connector nodes, a virtual-private-cloud-creation operation that securely interconnects a first organization edge appliance associated with a first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to a second organization edge appliance associated with a second virtual organization network within the second cloud-computing facility using an Internet-protocol-secure tunnel or a secure-socket-layer secure tunnel between the first and second organization edge appliances, each of the first and second organization edge appliances perform the steps of: receiving virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies from the cloud-connector server; internally storing the received virtual-private-network IP addresses in routing tables; distributing a portion of the virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies received from the cloud-connector server to additional edge appliances connected to the virtual organization network with which the organization edge appliance is associated; and providing a firewall that isolates a sub-network within each respective cloud-computing facility from a network external to each respective cloud-computing facility; distributes internal IP virtual-private-network addresses to the first and second cloud-computing facilities for use by two or more virtual-private-cloud members that execute within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to communicate over the virtual private network; and configures organization-edge appliances and edge appliances associated with virtual appliances within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to route packets transmitted by the two or more virtual-private-cloud members through the virtual private network.
 2. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 1 wherein a virtual-private-cloud member is one of: a virtual machine; and a virtual application.
 3. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 1 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation configures the organization-edge appliances and the edge appliances associated with the virtual appliances within the first and second cloud-computing facilities with rules and policies to control packet transmission within the virtual private network.
 4. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 1 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation creates a virtual private cloud distributed across three or more cloud-computing facilities by: securely interconnecting the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to each of the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities; distributing internal IP virtual-private-network addresses to the three or more cloud-computing facilities for use by virtual-private-cloud members that execute within organization virtual data centers to communicate over the virtual private network; and configuring organization-edge appliances and edge appliances associated with virtual appliances within the organization virtual data centers to route packets transmitted by virtual-private-cloud members through the virtual private network.
 5. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 4 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting each pair of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities with a secure tunnel.
 6. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 4 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting each of a set of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities into a tree or graph of organization-edge appliances with secure tunnels interconnecting pairs of organization-edge appliances.
 7. The cloud-connector subsystem of claim 4 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting the first virtual organization network with each of a set of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities as a star topology with secure tunnels that each interconnects the first virtual organization network with another the set of organization-edge appliances.
 8. A method that creates a virtual private cloud distributed across a first and a second cloud- computing facility that include cloud-connector nodes associated with each of the first and second cloud-computing facilities and a cloud-connector server that includes one or more processors, one or more memories, one or more data-storage devices, and computer instructions that are executed on the one or more processors control the cloud-connector server to provide, in cooperation with the cloud-connector nodes, a virtual-private-cloud-creation operation, the method comprising: securely interconnecting a first organization edge appliance associated with a first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to a second organization edge appliance associated with a second virtual organization network within the second cloud-computing facility using an Internet-protocol-secure tunnel or a secure-socket-layer secure tunnel between the first and second organization edge appliances, each of the first and second organization edge appliances perform the steps of: receiving virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies from the cloud-connector server; internally storing the received virtual-private-network IP addresses in routing labels; distributing a portion of the virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies received from the cloud-connector server to additional edge appliances connected to the virtual or organization network with which the organization edge appliance is associated; and providing a firewall that isolates a sub-network within each respective cloud-computing facility from a network external to each respective cloud-computing facility; distributing internal IP virtual-private-network addresses to the first and second cloud-computing facilities for use by two or more virtual-private-cloud members that execute within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to communicate over the virtual private network; and configuring organization-edge appliances and edge appliances associated with virtual appliances within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to route packets transmitted by virtual-private-cloud members through the virtual private network.
 9. The method of claim 8 wherein a virtual-private-cloud member is one of: a virtual machine; and a virtual application.
 10. The method of claim 8 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation configures the organization-edge appliances and the edge appliances associated with the virtual appliances within the first and second cloud-computing facilities with rules and policies to control packet transmission within the virtual private network.
 11. The method of claim 8 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation creates a virtual private cloud distributed across three or more cloud-computing facilities by: securely interconnecting the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to each of the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities; distributing internal IP virtual-private-network addresses to the three or more cloud-computing facilities for use by virtual-private-cloud members that execute within organization virtual data centers to communicate over the virtual private network; and configuring organization-edge appliances and edge appliances associated with virtual appliances within the organization virtual data centers to route packets transmitted by virtual-private-cloud members through the virtual private network.
 12. The method of claim 11 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting each pair of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities with a secure tunnel.
 13. The method of claim 11 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting each of a set of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities into a tree or graph of organization-edge appliances with secure tunnels interconnecting pairs of organization-edge appliances.
 14. The method of claim 11 wherein the virtual-private-cloud-creation operation securely interconnects the first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to the other two or more of the three or more cloud-computing facilities by interconnecting the first virtual organization network with each of a set of organization-edge appliances in different cloud-computing facilities as a star topology with secure tunnels that each interconnects the first virtual organization network with another the set of organization-edge appliances.
 15. Computer instructions stored on a memory device that, when executed one or more processors of a cloud-connector server that includes the one or more processors, one or more memories, and one or more data-storage devices that include the physical data-storage device, control the cloud-connector server to create a virtual private cloud distributed across a first and a second cloud-computing facility, carried out in a cloud-connector subsystem that includes cloud-connector nodes associated with each of the first and second cloud-computing facilities and the cloud-connector server, by: securely interconnecting a first organization edge appliance associated with a first virtual organization network within the first cloud-computing facility to a second organization edge appliance associated with a second virtual organization network within the second cloud-computing facility using an Internet-protocol-secure tunnel or a secure-socket-layer secure tunnel between the first and second organization edge appliances, each of the first and second organization edge appliances perform the steps of: receiving virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies from the cloud-connector server; internally storing the received virtual-private-network IP addresses in routing tables; distributing a portion of the virtual-private-network IP addresses and virtual-private-network configuration information, rules, and policies received from the cloud-connector server to additional edge appliances connected to the virtual organization network with which the organization edge appliance is associated; and providing a firewall that isolates a sub-network within each respective cloud-computing facility from a network external to each respective cloud-computing facility; distributing internal IP virtual-private-network addresses to the first and second cloud-computing facilities for use by two or more virtual-private-cloud members that execute within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to communicate over the virtual private network; and configuring organization-edge appliances and edge appliances associated with virtual appliances within the first and second cloud-computing facilities to route packets transmitted by the two or more virtual-private-cloud members through the virtual private network.
 16. The computer instructions of claim 15 wherein a virtual-private-cloud member is one of a virtual machine and a virtual application. 